It was January 2008. My Buddy Os and I sat in his apartment drinking a couple of rather dusty 3rmb bottles of Tsingtao beer. We were trying to plan a trip for Spring Festival (often referred to as Chinese New Year), but, alas, we were not having much luck. We had a myriad of destinations in mind. However, the increased demand for plane and train tickets during the holiday season meant that we were struggling to find a ticket to the right place at the right price – the majority of rail tickets had sold out and some of the prices airlines were quoting were just plain silly. We had had one brief glimpse of hope when discovered there were still train tickets available to Jiayouguan, the city at then end of the Great Wall. However, this was soon extinguished when we discovered the journey would take 36 hours.
Our hopes of playing with pandas in Chengdu came to nothing, as did my dreams of following in the footsteps of Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein, and exploring the Silk Road. The only place with plenty of tickets at a reasonable price was Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. Neither of us knew too much about it. So, as we opened another beer, we decided to google it. We quickly discovered that the Hohhot tourist board is in serious need of a more effective marketing department. Every page we found described Hohhot as the "Milk Capital of North China", which in our semi-drunken state created plenty of mirth.
Having got past the truly awful slogan, we discovered that Hohhot may actually have had some things to tempt us. Apparently, it had some interesting lamaseries, a thriving Muslim quarter and some of China's heartiest cuisine. So, as we chugged back another Tsingtao, we decided that there was nothing else for it but to book our tickets to the Milk Capital.
One of the main factors in helping decide to visit Hohhot was the food. Almost as soon as the tickets arrived, I had visions of the two of us biting into giant sheeps' legs in the style of Chinggis Khan and his conquest loving clan. Therefore, after we dumped our bags at our hotel and donned our thermals to insulate against the biting sub-zero temperatures, we went in search of some true Mongolian fare.
Living in Tianjin, we had tasted plenty of Mongolian restaurants. However, to me, the majority of these seemed to be Hanified – that may not actually be a real word, but I am using it to describe a minority in China that has been co-opted and watered down by the majority Han population. The mutton was thin and was served in a hot-pot with the type of noodles you would find in Beijing rather than out on the steppe. Therefore, we wanted the real thing. Sadly, it appeared Hohhot itself has been Hanified and finding genuinely ethnic food is not so easy.
On our first evening we headed out in high spirits. However, two hours later and all we had found was a slew of hot-pot restaurants that were no different to the ones we could find in Tianjin. It was only as we started to head back to the hotel that we found a small place serving a slightly different type of hot-pot. The delicate eastern noodles had been replaced by thick buck-wheat strands and the delicate slivers of meat had given way to giant chunks. This heady combination was fried up in a giant bowl set in the middle of our table. It wasn't quite what we had imagined, but we were getting closer.
Unfortunately, this proved to be the culinary highlight of the first three days of our trip. We failed to find anything better or anything remotely ethnic. We even tried the Muslim Quarter, with disastrous results. The restaurant we located had waiters in ethnic dress who very much looked the part. It even had authentic looking artwork on the walls and some rather enticing smells. Sadly, it had no English on the menu. Ignoring this impediment, we chanced our arm. Sadly, instead of the giant hulks of mutton we were craving, we were presented with a plate of sheep's stomach.
Our search was so fruitless that we even resorted to eating at Holiday Inn, although this worked well to settle our stomachs after eating sheep's … stomach. We had almost given up, when, on our last night, we sat down for hot-pot. Again it, was the standard Han fare, until we spied a table across the room tucking into a plate of the largest mutton ribs we had ever seen. We began gesticulating wildly at our waiter, desperately indicating that we wanted what they were having. Ten minutes later, my chin, my shirt and half of the table was covered in hot, greasy mutton fat as we gnawed away on the last morsels of meat left on the bones. It was truly delicious and had been worth waiting for.